ft. The Forgotten

Hosted by Nic on Mon 15 December, 2008 ; last updated on Thu 17 January, 2013 | 28 responses | We have a chatastic show this week. Plenty of Half-Life news and an in-depth interview with the leader of an unusual Half-Life 1 mod called The Forgotten.

Transmission Code: 10119

More news than you can shake a crowbar at, and that’s a lot! Brief discussion about the quality of video releases from mods in recent weeks and we all drool over the latest media from Start Trek Enterprise: Temporal Cold War.

dan said:

Today was the first time i tried Suicide Survival after you guys mentioned last podcast (and again on monday)… Man ,my face hurt all the time during all the game rounds because i was laughing and smiling continuously :))

opx said:

It’s too bad you can’t use Appletarts effects as they are actually SMODS effects. The creator of SMOD has declined to open source the code but will allow you to make some small tweaks to the gameplay if you include “SMOD” in the mods title, which for some reason Appletart did not do.

CubicVirtuoso said:

@DuckSauce: Sounds great can’t wait to check out this mod. Feel free to get a hold of us when you think it’s a good time for us to BETA test for you. Hopefully that same week we can have you on the show. I think an ingame manual such as that is a good idea. A lot of people get bored with round based games that don’t provide something other than a “spectate” mod while they are dead. Awesome use of gameplay time.

@Discrate: Yea I noticed that there isn’t actually a Citizen 2 moddb page, they seem to be recycling the Citizen 1 page.

@904: Thanks for the clarification! If I have some time I will try to check out ES, it’s been a while since I touched base with it.

I was disappointed you more or less dismissed Eternal Silence. Even though space-combat may not be one’s cup of tea, ES has come a long way this year, it’s not for nothing that they are going to be released via Steam.

They’re adding new (simpler) gameplay modes and adjusted maps because they understand that there was quite a learning curve to learn the original gameplay mode.

And some of the things discussed in the podcast are actually something the ES team is doing right, such as providing a good manual and even displaying how the game is played while the maps are loading. And I believe a training map was in the works, but I don’t know the status.

The forums are active and full of info about the gameplay and many of the beta-crew will help out anyone who wants to learn. And once you get the hang of it, the space battles are fierce and intense. A great multiplayer mod, strongly leaning on teamplay.

@Discrate: All “The Citizen 2″ content is posted on the same moddb profile to let people know a sequel is well underway and is part of the exact same story.
However, these 3 new chapters will be separate download.

DuckSauce said:

Me again, was in a rush earlier, still had some things I wanted to say:
First off and this is just a clarification of the above: once FragOut is in a decent state with some real variety in grenades(currently it’s just kill kill kill) and most bugs gone then I will be inviting people to come for a private test, so you guys are on that list, but right now you can easily get the wrong picture, as some things are still being discussed and aren’t yet implemented so it may be that things change so it’s best to wait until we’re nearly done.

Secondly, besides MelonDeath mode LMS will be different from the usual Last Man Standing gametype, but it’s not implemented yet, so I don’t wanna go in depth until it’s actually there.

Last but not least something in reaction to something discussed in this podcast: Tutorials/Instructions, for FragOut I plan to make an ingame “FragPedia” that shows the first time you can play and subsequent time’s unless you choose for it not to and can be killed with the touch of a button so you can read it after you have no lives left and are forced to spectate so you can read it up on how to prevent ending up in spectate :P

Most important part of it is that you can read it while you’re out of play, so you have something to do and like I said above, learn how to get better at the mod.

How would you guys feel about such an ingame manual?

Discrate said:

DuckSauce said:

first of all, the gameplay video is not a trailer(just to get that clear) and it’s mostly to show progress and it’s also not the first. It’s the second but the first was more like a 1on1 fragout duel while in the second video there’s like 4-5 people playing.

The guy who made the second video(PhanracK) also recorded something for a next video, when playing with 6-8 players! which was very intense, but since we don’t wanna spam video’s we’ll be waiting until there’s more to show and a bigger video to make.

Also to get this clear: There is no actual deathmatch mode. There is Last Man Standing and Last Team Standing. Last Man Standing is currently the most popular among the testers, players get a set amount of lives(usually 3 to 5 lives in our tests) and there’s about 2 or 3 minutes roundtime. So if you die you don’t have to wait very long.

MelonDeath mode is part of both those gamemodes and adds to the frantic action.

Anyway, we currently consist of 5 devs, 3 “special testers” and 5 beta testers, the beta testers were being withheld from testing at first until we had it nearly done to get a fresh view from new “players” but now we let them test as well, since we can always get more testers later.
If you guys want you can play the beta, once we’re near a release, so you will get (hopefully) a better impression of the mod, now we’re facing still a good bunch of bugs and have many other things to do.

Half-Life_Maniac said:

USS Darkstar discussions certainly brought back memories for me, just for a moment when William was going on about PC Gamer and the give away disc it took me back 10 years. Back in those days we did not have a lot of options or outlets to fuel our HL wants and needs, so checking out the PC Gamer for any HL mods became top priority. I still have all those early PC Gamer discs with HL mods including USS Darkstar, which by the way still ranks among the very best along with a few others; I can only think of Poke 646 that I would rank higher after all these years. I know scores and rankings donâ€™t mean a lot we all see mods in a different light, but itâ€™s interesting to look back and see what HL sites scored USS Darkstar at the time. So here are a few site scores that I recorded at the time. H-King 10/10, EH/10 8.6/10, H16 10/10, LM 9/10, me 9/10. Donâ€™t think any of these sites exist today.

D3ads said:

Nah, my name is Alistair, it’s just you spelt it “Alistiar” before that’s all, unless my eyesight is playing tricks with me D: Hehe.

@Daz

Thanks very much! If you’re not much of a fan of horror mods, you might still enjoy TF because there are lots of different elements that go into it such as the Vietnam parts where action is all around :)

CubicVirtuoso said:

@deej: Thanks for the comment. I think your trailer did exactly what you guys were wanted it to do. If you and your team ever wanted to be on the show feel free to contact us at [email protected]. We would love to have you!

@Daz: That’s true, we never mentioned that gameplay elements were lacking from the StarTrek TCW media, but it certainly got our attention.

@RKB: Yea… I am in love with Empires right now.

@m82sniper: Yea it was good to see you in the server. Wonderful coincidence.

I had a peek at the website for The Forgotten and it looks very impressive! For a goldsrc mod the visuals are great, particularly the abandoned interiors. I can’t really comment on gameplay as I’ve only ever played the 1st resident evil and I’ve never played Silent Hill, they just are not the type of game I am interested in.

StarTrek TCW, the video I checked out was very cool, I see what you mean about the voice actor sounding like Archer, I wonder how many auditions they did to find that guy :) Again production values are very very high but no real gameplay is shown, so im still on the fence I guess!

Thanks for mentioning the neotokyo trailer. As for as it’s content, obviously we want to get peoples attention, but aside from that, there is nothing in there that does not actually happen in game, minus the extra bloom on the video and black and white. We did not want to show all our goodies, just a small taste that would leave people scratching their heads and wanting to see more. Hopefully we are successful in that. @Daz, the ghost (robot) has a significant impact on the game ;)

CubicVirtuoso said:

@D3ads: Is it spelled Allister? That’s how I changed it. Also added the forgotten to the link list.. haha we forgot it… get it? Lawlz. Anyway we mirrored the image so the bulk of the image would be on the left; works better with our summaries on the main page.

Ahh USS Darkstar,a tear came to my eyes when you all started getting nostalgic about that mod. I also picked that up from the PC gamer magazine and was blown away by it!

Very interesting discussion about trailers, regarding the NT trailer I cant say it impressed me that much, sure the production values were off the charts but from what I can see the gameplay looks very much like counter strike with futuristic weapons. I had real hope when I saw the flying robots but it seems they have no impact on gameplay at all. Hopefully I am wrong :)

CubicVirtuoso said:

I had a hard time editing this podcast last night because I was so obsessed with Empires 2.2. I just have to say this mod is extremely fun and has came a long way in development over the past couple of months. The community is great and there are tons of people always online who are willing to help new players. Also there is an excellent Wiki on their site that outlines all the features and what you need to do to get started (if you don’t mind reading). If you want a really good teamplay mod hit up Empires 2.2; I’ll be playing all week so don’t hesitate to contact me on Steam if you want to play a game.